The Settlers III

What works

• Installation
• Singleplayer
• Multiplayer (requires "winetricks directplay")
• Saving & loading

What does not

A few smaller glitches:

• using the right-mouse button to scroll the map works in a strange way (==map moves much faster than it should). Scrolling on the edges of the window works without problems, but unfortunately this makes the game hardly playable in Wine's windowed mode
• when exiting a multiplayer game, the game freezes
• the game uses more CPU power than it should, but on a modern machine (PhenomII X3 720) you won't notice too much of it

Workarounds

What was not tested

-

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

The Settlers 3 and the aLobby work without major issues only with the following Wine versions* (as of 2024-08-05):

• 8.15+ (and probably some earlier 8.x versions)
  
• 5.19-5.22
  
• 5.0-5.5
  
• 4.5-4.21
  
• 4.0.2-4.0.4
  
• 1.7.53-1.7.54

* tested versions were usually the "Staging" versions

Below is a list of versions known to cause major problems:

• Wine versions starting with 8.16 introduced some strange problems when trying to start the VPN of the aLobby for Multiplayer gaming
  • Fixed with newer aLobby versions
• Wine versions starting with 6.0-rc1 introduced major crash issues ("Structured Exception" / "SE") into the game
  
• Wine versions between 5.6 and 5.18 cause mouse problems when starting the game (bug 49347)
  
• Wine versions 5.7 and 5.8 cause problems with the aLobby. Fixed in Wine 5.9.
  
• Wine version 5.6 breaks the aLobby VPN (bug 48937). Fixed in Wine 5.7.
  
• Wine versions starting with 1.7.55 and below 4.0.2 (on the stable branch) and below 4.5 (on the devel-branch) introduced major mouse problems into the game (bug 38087)
  
  • On the staging-branch the affected versions are all below 1.9.0
• Wine versions below 1.7.53 crash on the Settlers 3 intro-movie (bug 5771) (the workaround for this bug is to disable the intro in the S3-settings)
• Wine versions below 1.5.26 cause freezes in multi player games (bug 29499)

This game requires much more processing power than it should, so unless you are using a relatively fast computer, it may run slowly (Bug 32478 and Bug 38169).

The used graphics card may also be of importance here: with NVIDIA (binary driver) the game is the fastest on Linux, with INTEL the slowest.

A workaround which makes at least the lag occurring every few seconds go away, is to start Settlers 3 on 1 CPU only with:

taskset -c 0 wine S3.EXE

If you want to play online using the aLobby, you have to start the aLobby the same way:

taskset -c 0 wine alobby.exe

Hint: taskset is only available on Linux, not on macOS

Only applicable to old Wine versions (< 8.0):

• Disabling CSMT (only easily possible with Wine Staging) increases the performance
  
• ATTENTION: Using the above taskset command without CSMT disabled decreases the performance instead of improving it!